Last Saturday, October 26, 2024, another edition of the London Perl & Raku Workshop took place. It was a reopening after a few years break. London Perl Workshop has a long history, started in 2004, so this year it was formally 20 years old.
The Covid time
For me, it was also a Perl-and-or-Raku event after a break. The last in-person event was PerlCon 2019, which was an annual European Perl conference that was held in Riga that year. Since then, after the Covid’s strike, I have organised a couple of (well, three of them) Raku Conferences, but that was online in Zoom. Online due to lockdown first, and then due to people slowly reinventing the joy of travel.
In-between, there were at least two in-person gatherings, another edition of the German Perl and Raku Workshop in April and the American Perl and Raku Conference in Las Vegas in June. I did not attend any of them, but looked at the photos and videos, so I was envy enough because I missed it.
To go or not to go
You should not forget that right now, right today, at this very moment, an on-going war against my beloved Ukraine takes place. During the first months, it was not possible to think about anything else, not to mention any entertainment trips or conferences. But time keeps going… and you see less and less blue-and-yellow flags on the streets. Even at Waterstones, the books about that war are located at the very bottom shelves due to the unfortunate nature of alphabetical sorting.
Waterstones in Southampton.
When this year’s London Perl Workshop was announced, I decided to go. Then, I decided not to go. In the end, one week before the event, I thought that I’d better go. Because of my uncertainty, I did not manage to submit a talk on time, so even a small 5-minute lightning talk submission (which I did on the day of the event, ha-ha), did not have a chance to went through. The venue, apparently, was rented until 6pm sharp, and there was no room for anything else.
So, here are the slides of my talks. I’ve added some comments so that you can enjoy it by following my message.
London and more
My journey was quite short, I only had a couple of days in London, but the weather made its present and the plane from Amsterdam landed in Southampton instead. So, I took a chance to see the old walls there and to learn that they offer beans on breakfast at IKEA’s canteen.
I really enjoy London, it’s so huge that you fill extremely comfortable in it, how weird that may sound. Despite only a limited couple of days in London, I tried to use the time to wander around just as a tourist.
I also escaped from the middle of the conference day to see the urban life around venue’s location.
Old friends
On the day before the conference, I met with an ex-colleague, with whom I worked at two different places, both Perl-related. For a few years, he’s been living in London, and I noticed that he looked so much happier since I last saw him. I hope that is because he lives in this great city now, not because he’s programming in Go, not Perl anymore.
Of course, I was happy to see people I know from the Perl and/or Raku communities. I did not see most of them at least since 2019, so some of them required a few seconds to recognise me, LOL.
The Conference
The workshop was really well attended. Even taking into account the significant drop in the numbers since the beginning of 2000s, it was more than 100 people, and there were two full tracks of the talks.
Let me not list the talks I attended, as the full schedule is online, and the recordings should appear soon.
There was also a third track, partially filled with regular talks, but partially with a broader-scoped events such as Science Perl Talks. I’ve no idea what they talked about there, but it’s somehow connected with the recently-published first issue of the Science Perl Journal and a traditional drama around its establisher.
But the appearance of the new publication is a good thing in the end. I was also surprised, that in 2024, a few new publications about Perl appeared or are planned to be published. I suspect that some of them issued during the previous years are AI-generated texts, but the rest are quite normal and useful books.
The Next years
There are no decision yet whether there will be another London Perl Workshop in 2025. On the bright side, there should be a soon announcement on the date and location of the German Perl Workshop 2025. Also, there are plans to have a Dutch Perl Workshop 2025 in Utrecht.
I am thinking of if it’s time to revitalise the annual European Perl and Raku Conference.